After months of speculation, Microsoft has finally announced the Xbox 360 Elite. Everything included with the Xbox 360 Elite is black instead of white, like the initial Xbox 360. One of the major additions to the Xbox 360 Elite is full HDMI support. There’s also a 120GB hard drive, much larger than the 20GB that came with my Xbox 360 Premium package.
I won’t be purchasing an Xbox 360 Elite. I would like to have a 120GB hard drive, but I can buy one for my premium system later on. I can’t justify paying $479.99 for a 120GB drive, I couldn’t even use the HDMI support. I do like the black though, very sleek looking.
The Xbox Domain has some more specs on the Xbox 360 Elite. They also have some prices for the new accessories.
- 120GB hard drive (black)
- HDMI (high-definition multimedia interface) port
- Wireless controller (black)
- Xbox LIVE headset (black)
- HDMI cable
- Component/SD cable
- One month subscription to Xbox Live Gold
Xbox Live’s Major Nelson has an interview with Albert on the new Xbox 360 Elite. He’s also got a Flickr photoset containing a bunch of pictures of the new Xbox 360 Elite and the new accessories. Pretty neat.
Xbox 360 Fanboy has a large post highlighting all the new features and accessories for the Xbox 360 Elite. Joystiq has pretty much the same info, but with more pictures.
TwitThis is cool. The TwitThis plugin adds a “TwitThis” badge for each post on your WordPress site. TwitThis doesn’t send tweets when you’re writing a new post or editing an existing post like the Twitter Updater plugin. TwitThis makes it easy for your readers to let the world know they’re reading one of your posts or performing some other action on your site.
TwitThis is an easy way for people to send Twitter messages about your
blog post or website. When visitors to your website click on the
TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the webpage and creates a
shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL
and a description of the web page to all of their friends on Twitter
If you don’t use WordPress, you can still make use of TwitThis. There’s a simple piece of javascript code you can insert on your page to get a TwitThis badge for non-WordPress websites. Head over to the TwitThis website for more information.
You can see TwitThis in action right here at longren.org. The TwitThis badge should be immediately below the Share This badge.
I’ve made quite a few posts about the problems I’ve had with my Xbox 360. You can take a look at the Xbox 360 tag archive for the entire list of posts. I’d like to highlight a few comments in those posts from readers. There’s been some great comments by readers, some go into pretty good detail.
All of the comments on all those posts in the Xbox 360 tag archive add up to a very valuable resource for gamers experiencing problems with their Xbox 360. You may have to do a little reading, but there’s some great comments there. Now, here’s some of my favorites.
Read more
Want to show your latest entry to Twitter on your WordPress blog or website? It’s really very simple. Don’t be scared off by the vague instructions for adding a badge at the Twitter Badge page. The Twitter Badge page has some Flash badges at the very top and some javascript badges immediately below the Flash badges.
We’re mostly interested in the javascript badges. I don’t give two shits about Flash and refuse to add something to this site that will cause unnecessary lag just because it’s “pretty”. I’m a pretty devout follower of the K.I.S.S. philosophy. And besides, all we’re covering here is how to show your latest Twitter entry, pretty basic. Take a look below to see how I display “My Latest Twitter” in my sidebar.
1. Open your themes sidebar.php file (probably in /wp-content/themes/theme_name/).
2. Determine where you would like your Recent Twitter Status to appear in your sidebar.
3. Copy the following code and paste it into sidebar.php in the location you chose in step 2.
<div class="sb-lasttwitter">
<h2><a href="http://twitter.com/<em>yourTwitterUsername</em>/"><?php _e('My Latest Twitter'); ?></a></h2>
<ul><li>
### insert javascript for Twitter Badge here ###
</li></ul>
</div>
4. Open your themes style.css file and add a class called sb-lasttwitter. You can expand on the styling for the sb-lasttwitter class all you want. The CSS I use is below, it should work for most people as-is.
/*- most recent twitter*/
.sb-lasttwitter ul li {
list-style-type: none;
}
5. After adding the sb-lasttwitter CSS class, save your style.css file and upload the newly modified file to your website.
6. Login to your Twitter account and click the “Badge” link at the top.
7. Click the first javascript badge, it should automatically select all of the code when you click on it. Copy the selected javascript code to your clipboard (right-click and copy).
8. After you’ve copied the badge javascript, go back to sidebar.php and find the line that reads: ### insert javascript for Twitter Badge here ###. Replace that line with the javascript you copied from step 7.
9. Save sidebar.php and upload it to your website, it goes in the same directory you uploaded style.css to.
10. Done! Visit your blog to (hopefully) see your latest twitter in the sidebar.
Once you’re done with that you should see “My Latest Twitter” in your sidebar. Immediately below that text you should see your most recent Twitter and how long ago it was entered.
You should also note that the code from step 2 may not work for every WordPress theme, in fact, it probably won’t. However, you should be able to make a few simple changes to make it fit perfectly with your blog’s theme. My point is, you may have to modify that code (and the CSS) to make this show properly with the rest of your blog theme.
Please be aware that the Twitter javascript badge breaks XHTML 1.0 Transitional validation. Fortunately, it’s an easy fix to get pages including the Twitter javascript badge to validate again. Remember, this is the javascript we copied in step 7.
Anyway, to make it pass XHTML 1.0 Transitional validation, have a look at the very last line of the javascript, towards the end of the line, should look similar to this:
?callback=twitterCallback&count=1"></script>
Replace the text above with the following text:
?callback=twitterCallback&count=1"></script>
Modifying the last line of the javascript as described above will make your site/blog pass XHTML 1.0 Transitional validation, assuming nothing else in your site is broken. WDG has some good information on why this change will help your site pass validation.
If you have any problems with this, please let me know! I will try to help people as much as I can, no promises though. If there’s enough interest, I may end up throwing together a very simple wordpress plugin to do all this automatically. It would seem the only Twitter WordPress plugins currently available require the WordPress Widgets plugin, which I don’t use. I just want a simple plugin to include the basic javascript badge without the need for Widgets. If nothing pops up within the next few weeks I’ll probably get to work on a plugin of my own.
There are two full featured Twitter WordPress plugins currently in development, both should be fantastic. The first plugin is Twitter Tools from Alex King. Twitter Tools aims to provide full integration between Twitter and WordPress. The second plugin in development is Twitt-Twoo from Dean J. Robinson. Twitt-Twoo isn’t aiming to be a full integration plugin like Twitter Tools. Twitt-Twoo is much more basic, although I believe it will allow you to post to twitter right from the sidebar of your blog, provided you’re logged in. I’m not sure if that functionality will be included in Twitter Tools as well or not.
After months of speculation, Microsoft has finally announced the Xbox 360 Elite. Everything included with the Xbox 360 Elite is black instead of white, like the initial Xbox 360. One of the major additions to the Xbox 360 Elite is full HDMI support. There’s also a 120GB hard drive, much larger than the 20GB that came with my Xbox 360 Premium package.